


What are we?

by Zoesiapie



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Angst, Brothers, Experiment, Gen, How Do I Tag, I'm Sorry, War, black - Freeform, i love them, true - Freeform
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-01-22
Updated: 2021-01-22
Packaged: 2021-03-14 01:16:01
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,571
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28912971
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Zoesiapie/pseuds/Zoesiapie
Summary: The only Regulus who changes his mind is the one in his dreams, when compromise is no longer compromise, but is the only reality he knows. Sirius dreams, and in all the mess in his head, his dreams manage to be beautiful. They're more dips into the past, hands clasping and laughter and chases through a house that even the unconscious doesn't want to delineate.They are dreams in which Regulus pauses to catch his breath, dreams in which he turns to stare at him with wide eyes, "What are we?" he asks him in an uncomfortable rhythm."We are brothers, what else should we be?"
Comments: 1
Kudos: 10





	What are we?

**Author's Note:**

  * A translation of [Che cosa siamo noi?](https://archiveofourown.org/external_works/746778) by Sia_. 



"But doesn't it suck for you?"

Regulus looks up from his book, his vacant stare piercing Sirius from side to side.

"What?" 

"All this."

He doesn't point to anything, doesn't have enough fingers to show him what that everything is.

_Our mother, our father, your room, the living room._

_A little bit of you, too, actually._

Even the answer he gets sucks.

There's something wrong with the way Regulus' gaze judges him when they pass each other in the halls of Hogwarts, and it's wrong with the way Sirius responds to that provocation: they say nothing to each other, but silence between the two of them has always been enough. It doesn't even hurt, they both tell each other, averting their eyes and downing something that tastes more bitter than a Butterbeer at the Hog's Head. Padfoot makes a note not to drink it anymore, who knows what they put in those mugs, who knows when they really cleaned them last time. 

_It doesn't even hurt_. 

But Sirius, lying in his canopy in the middle of the night, thinks that there must be pain somewhere, hidden among all those sheets he hates to cover himself with: a part of his heart stings, while Regulus emerges from the depths of his soul and realizes that of all that wrong life he left behind, he is the part that is missing. If he puts his mind to it, Sirius can still remember the feeling of his hand clutching his brother's to go play together somewhere: he was taking him away, hoping to make up stories and fantasies that weren't tainted with stereotypes. Not those too, they're just a child's pastime. 

He hasn't felt like such a child since he arrived at Hogwarts, that's the truth, and he doesn't need to try that hard to feel James' hand clasped in his. _It hurts a little less_ , he tells himself, when he reaches that compromise that makes him sleep. 

They're good dreams, Sirius's.

They are nightmares, those of Regulus, who falls asleep as soon as possible and then wakes up in the middle of the night, sending the sheets twisted over his body to hell. He makes himself small in bed, leaning his back against the headboard and stays to listen to his roommates breathing: it was Sirius' breaths, on the nights they spent in the same room to be less lonely. _It always hurts_ , he tells himself, when he wakes up and feels an emptiness in his chest. 

It hurt at home that summer, too, in the brief moments when he'd cast a glance around Sirius's old room and not find him writing a letter to Potter, when he wouldn't find him laughing with a book in his hand - _Remus advised me of that, kind of him to worry about my intellectual emptiness._

It's not an intellectual void, it's that Sirius doesn't really have a brain. If he had one, he wouldn't have left it alone: there's no one to tell stories and fantasies, there's no one to ward off the darkness of that house. He will end up being swallowed up altogether. 

"But doesn't it gross you out?"

Sirius is staring at him, but he doesn't seem to be locked in those walls with him.

"What?" 

"All this."

He's not pointing at anything, assuming Regulus will figure it out on his own.

_You take too many things for granted._

_It all sucks less anyway, if two of us live it._

he tells him he doesn't know.

It hurts on a Thursday afternoon. 

Sirius can't get over Regulus' move, taking a seat in front of him in the Library. Perhaps he didn't notice, with the tables full and his face hidden in the book he's studying. He cashes in on the blow of that indifference, the major, and goes back to looking at his own pages. It hurts if they don't even hate each other, it hurts if they pretend they were never anything. Yet Sirius was the one chasing him down the stairs, Sirius was the one tickling him, and Regulus was the one always laughing. 

Since when did one not provide the other with laughter? It must have been years now. If Regulus ever heard him laugh again, it was because of the letters that wouldn't stop coming in the summer. They seemed to give him confidence that he was being replaced. 

"You're supposed to be in class," Sirius finally whispered, evading the questioning gaze of James at his side. 

"Did you memorize my schedule?" the other asks him, not even deigning to take his eyes off the book. He asks the one, to avoid dropping an avalanche of feelings in there - _Do you still care that much?_

Sirius starts tapping his foot against the floor, annoyed - _You're still my brother, Regulus._ He decides to remain silent, hoping that thought will be heard all the same; he doesn't quite get that, by dint of eating their words, they've ended up not understanding each other. 

"I didn't want to go." Regulus has never been expansive with people, but with Sirius it's different: there's a strange bitterness that hits him full in the chest when he sees him talking to Potter and thinks Potter should be him. He persists in continuing the conversation, finally looking up at his brother with his dark eyes. 

James gets straighter in his chair, alert. He imitates Padfoot's tense movements when Severus comes up the corridors to whisper something: it's complicity, but even Prongs can't completely understand, because he didn't live his childhood with Snape. It is Sirius who signals him to be quiet, "How come you didn't want to go?"

 _I wanted to be with you._ It's not even a special day, it's just another day, it's a Thursday afternoon that has nothing different from Tuesday mornings or Sunday evenings, it's really nothing. What is something, however, is the pain that Regulus can't seem to silence in his dormitory. _I wanted to be with you, that if I wake up at night I think you're no longer in my life._

"So," Regulus swallows down that storm of words he's afraid to let out, because he's afraid of his mother and father and he's afraid he's not as strong as Sirius, "I just didn't feel like it."

"When I say that, Remus usually drags me to class by the strap - he really does care too much about my brain," Sirius comments, giving little thought to the meaning of that sentence. There is someone in the world who holds him in the palm of his hand and gives him love: Lupin doesn't care about Padfoot's brain, but he does care about Padfoot. He worries when he breathes differently because he's thinking about Grimmauld Place, he worries if he doesn't move his pupils away from the emptiness of the ceiling, he worries if he doesn't fill the silence with some stupid sentence, a consequence of his being a bit of a late child.

"You don't care?" the Slytherin bends the corner of his book and clenches his jaw. 

"About what?" 

_About me, dragging me to class. You're my brother, aren't you? Drag me to class._

"Of your intellect, you've always neglected it," he says instead, putting the page back and pulling his hands away from the paper. It fuels the fire of that flame that divides them second by second.

Sirius shakes his head in amusement, drumming his fingers on the wood, "I've always told you, there are far more important things." 

"Like what?" 

_Don't you remember the afternoons I spent playing with you instead of studying?_

"Girls." He decides to tell him, a wicked smile coloring his face in hopes of bridging the gap a bit, in hopes of erasing the judgment in Regulus' eyes, who must have heard all kinds of things from his mother over the summer. Who knows what he told him: stories full of stereotypes, stories that don't make sense from start to finish for Sirius, but which he fears may begin to for Regulus. 

"You're always so shallow, girls." 

Sirius smiles at him unconsciously at that point: something has clicked with Regulus' bored expression that mimics Remus' a lot, with that tone he takes so much from James. He doesn't realize that it hurts, that his brother is a piece of everything his friends are and that he's been looking for him all along, not knowing that he's right there.

Regulus tightens his lips and blushes a little (Peter is there too), going back to studying the book in hopes of mitigating that strange happiness he feels in his chest: maybe he'll be able to sleep that night after so long. 

"Go to class next time."

Regulus clutches the book to his chest and wedges the chair under the table.

He lowers his eyes to his brother, who is writing something on a scroll.

"Are you being a parent now?" 

"What else am I supposed to do?"

_It's not like those are a mom and dad._

He tells him he's going to class. 

"Go to class next time."

Sirius doesn't take his eyes off the parchment he's writing. 

He doesn't even lift them when he hears the sound of the chair getting stuck under the table.

"Are you being a parent now?" 

"What else am I supposed to do?"

_The brother: I didn't know someone could miss me like this._

He doesn't tell her, he'll never have the courage.

For a while it seems that there is no hatred, there in between, but the raw awareness of the existence of so much diversity - the way they walk, the way they punctuate words and give rhythm to sentences, the way they laugh. 

Regulus has a heavy laugh as he thinks that maybe his brother isn't as Mom describes him in the letters he sends him from home, maybe there's something he hasn't really understood, maybe if he tries a little harder he can still read the veiled things Sirius has let fly away like a cloud of steam in winter. He watches him, when he sits as close to him as possible in the grass around Hogwarts and hears him talking to his clique of friends: certain gestures will never change, they are the same ones he often touched him with at home, when it was still home for both of them. With them he is Sirius indeed, this he thinks clutching the cover of his books and carefully measures the distance that has formed between their two souls: it will not diminish, _he knows._

Sirius doesn't seek him out enough, doesn't tell him more stories to push away the ideas his parents have carved into his head: with every laugh he exchanges with James and every hug he shares with Remus, he gives it up a little more. 

_It's your fault they're like this_ \- Regulus would rather torture himself with that idea than feel the gaping emptiness that spreads through his chest at the thought that their differences will eventually drive them apart altogether. At the thought that sooner or later it will really come, the moment when they will stop ever being something.

Sirius doesn't want to think about such things, doesn't want to give so much credit to the pain he feels in his chest when he reaches his bed at night. He knows someone has to take the blame for that wound, the first of many, but he doesn't want to take it on himself. It's their stupid family's fault, it's their words' fault, it's his fault... _It's not his fault_. He didn't leave to wrong them, he didn't leave to walk the halls of Hogwarts and feel the bitter tension hovering between him and Regulus, he left to start living. 

He's been trying to change his mind for so many years, he's now one step away from giving it up: he's fine in his world and doesn't want to know anything about what's outside anymore. Let him get there on his own, he thinks sometimes, and then he doesn't sleep at night, even with the compromise of having James by his side. Let him get there on his own? Regulus doesn't have the face of someone who can figure it out, the problem. When letters arrive from Grimmauld Place, the younger man's face glows with a light that Sirius cannot comprehend; when letters arrive from Grimmuald Place, Regulus thinks he is less alone.

Might as well give up then, they will never fully understand each other.

"You think you're better than me?"

Regulus bites the inside of his cheek, focusing on that pain,

rather than feeling the twinge in his heart.

"What kind of question is that?"

"Do you think so, Sirius?"

_Of course I think I'm better than you._

_Do you see the people you walk around the school with?_

"Did they tell you that in the letters? You need to stop giving credence to that crap."

Sirius and Regulus sometimes argue, James looks like a puppet when the tones get heated and he goes all straight to his friend's side. Screw him, that Potter who never understands where he belongs. He doesn't belong there, inside their fights, he doesn't belong in the middle of the emptiness that clutches their chests and makes them angry. It's not even bitterness anymore, what they feel, just yet another realization that a burned name is all that will be left in the end, even for Regulus. 

He's been searching for truth his whole life, in his brother's stories, in his parents' speeches, in Bella's who occasionally visited their home and filled the games with something that now makes all the sense in the world - _it's you who doesn't get it Sirius and it's your fault for not getting it._

He's tried to make lies and truths coexist, Regulus, but he can't anymore: the words written in the letters erase the image of big brother he's embroidered on himself since childhood every day. The words carved into the scrolls have frayed that armor made of love. He doesn't remember what it's like to be loved like that: it's been too long since his mother's cold caress has been enough to make him feel less alone, too long since the Slytherin's attention has made him feel better than he ever has.

"You think you're better than me?"

Sirius tightens his lips into a line.

What the fuck does he have to say to him now? Admitting it hurts too much.

"What kind of question is that?"

"Do you think so, Sirius?"

_I know you think so, I might as well dodge my questions._

_It's not the end of the world if we end it here, is it?_

"Did they tell you that in the letters? You need to stop giving credence to that crap."

It's the end of the world to end it there.

Sirius has even stopped being a child now. Remus can tell by the way he walks, by the way the void on the ceiling is deeper than before, by the way he no longer fills the silence with some silly phrase. He has suddenly become an adult. It took the realization that he had lost even the small part of his childhood that had ever made sense. He can't feel it anymore, to commit to feeling the sensation of Regulus' hand locked in his, palm to palm telling stories. It's the end of the world, erasing that thing there.

"It's not bullshit."

"It's not?" Sirius laughs, and the laughter grates on his throat.

Regulus stiffens his jaw, annoyed by that attack.

"Then it will be true that I am better than you."

Sirius finds home in James, he finds it in Remus, he finds it in Peter as well: none of the three have anything of Regulus, because Regulus isn't even Regulus anymore, walking around as if everything is owed to him. _He knew, that he wouldn't get there on his own._

"He'll come around." Lupin sits beside him, warming him by taking his fingers and clasping them to his own. 

"You don't know what he's like, he won't change it: he chose to be a Death Eater." 

"You don't know what he's like either." James leans against the end of the bed and rests a hand on his ankle, shrugging his leg off. 

The only Regulus who changes his mind is the one in his dreams, when compromise is no longer compromise, but is the only reality he knows. Sirius dreams, and in all the mess in his head, his dreams manage to be beautiful. They are dips into the past, hands clasping and laughter and chases through a house that even the unconscious doesn't want to delineate. 

They are dreams in which Regulus pauses to catch his breath, dreams in which he turns to stare at him with wide eyes, "What are we?" he asks him in an uncomfortable rhythm. 

"We are brothers, what else should we be?"

_"What are we, Regulus?"_

_"We are no longer a we, let's stop telling each other stories."_

Barely hinted shadows of a happy memory.

Sirius shrugs his shoulders and with wide strides reaches the figure of his brother who is looking out the window: a way to not think about all that's exploding in his head.

The major's boots echo through the hallway, announcing him even before he can open his mouth and reveal his presence. 

"Have you come to say goodbye?" Regulus shoves his hands back into his pockets and clenches them into two fists. 

"Yes."

Sirius' breath fogs the glass and darkens the landscape: why does it still matter so much? They're nothing, they've also learned to forget and forget themselves. Leaving Hogwarts, however, is tighter on him than he ever could have believed. It is the last renunciation he allows himself.

"You might as well not have bothered." Regulus swallows his own venom and chases down that urge to reach out and touch his brother's body one last time. What did he come there for? Why does he want to fill the void? They were the end of the world, that was all it took. 

"I know, I just felt like it." 

It has the whiff of a Thursday afternoon, that goodbye - back to hurting, who knows if they'll be able to get any sleep that night. 

Regulus lets a sigh escape, the Dark Mark burns on the skin of his arm and he feels that nothing has changed after all, that he's the only person who gets words out of him with silences, "Sirius, don't get yourself killed out there." 

"Make sure you survive too." _Survive_? Regulus is nothing anymore, with all those ends of the world, with all that cold love, with all those ideas that make sense but burn his skin. Why does truth have the whiff of a lie?

_"What are we, Sirius?"_

_"I don't know anymore."_

There is a war out there, Regulus feels it all over him: there is someone in that war who makes the war more than it should be. _I wonder if he's alive_ , he thinks sometimes. Who knows if he's still with Potter and the other two whose names he never bothered to learn. 

_I wonder if he'll ever see him again_. These are thoughts that reach him and become truth. He smiles, watching the flames in the hearth dance and listens distractedly to his mother's speech. She never talks about him, Sirius in that house no longer exists. He should be everywhere instead, it would put some sense into his surroundings. 

It's been a while since he started believing his brother's stories again, a while since he went back to imagining their escapes and their hands not letting go: if he ever made a mistake, it was taking him for granted.

 _It all sucks_ , it still would have sucked less if there were two of them. I wonder if he'll ever get a chance to tell her in person, a chance to apologize for those gaps he helped create. 

Sirius has those gaps all over his skin, especially when he raises his wand and casts spells against the Death Eaters and hopes he doesn't find Regulus in front of him: sometimes he thinks that if he finds him on the battlefield he'll send everything to hell and take him away. He sends it all to hell, clutches his palm and stops giving it up. James teases him, because he still thinks about Regulus and Padfoot laughs, closes in his shoulders and tells him that he would do the same thing to him: he would send the war to hell, to save his life. 

"Sirius."

Remus' voice is a whisper that Thursday afternoon.

"What's with the long face?" Sirius laughs and closes the book in his hands.

"They say he's dead."

"Who?" 

_How can I tell you?_

_That if you collapse in front of my eyes now I won't know how to catch you._

"Your brother."

_Impossible_ , he answers him, James is in the kitchen with Lily.

"Sirius."

Remus' voice is a whisper that Thursday afternoon.

"What's with the long face?" Sirius laughs and closes the book in his hands.

"They say he's dead."

"Who?" 

_You don't need to keep talking, it's written all over you._

_It's the end of the world, closing it like that._

"Your brother."

_Impossible_ , he answers him, James is in the kitchen with Lily.

**Author's Note:**

> I come to these notes with a bit of embarrassment. I woke up yesterday and thought I wanted to write about Sirius, but I didn't want to go down and get Remus. So I thought about Regulus, a character I'm really touching for the first time and who I've most likely come to spoil - I don't even know if he's OOC or not.  
> It's a story that gave me so much, that made me discover a new world, and I'll always be grateful to these two characters for being what they are: empty, silent, a set of obvious things. And brothers.  
> I wanted them to be brothers, I wanted Regulus to realize what they were, I wanted Sirius to face that perdina. It's a relationship that I've read about here and there, but I'm glad I gave myself a chance to give my perspective a little.  
> I hope you enjoyed this story, from the bottom of my little heart. Thank you for spending time on it,  
> Zoesia ❤


End file.
